Slashdot Mirror
High-Altitude Balloon Tweets Earth
celsomartinho writes "Spacebits is yet another low-cost High-Altitude Balloon (HAB) with a computer probe being launched to near space on 30 May, this time in Portugal. The twist with this project, besides the cool electronics, cameras, and sensors on board, is the fact that the team provided the online community with a real-time web dashboard so that everyone can follow the two-hour journey up to 100,000 feet and back to earth. Real-time data includes measurements from all its sensors, including temperature, pressure, humidity and air quality, altitude, acceleration, and GPS coordinates and a live Twitter feed. The team is also using a public GSM network to send SMS lat/lon/alt coordinates to anyone willing to go on launch site and participate in the probe hunt." The balloon goes off Memorial Day weekend, so bookmark the page if you're on call.
A mindless orb looking down on us all posting updates about its uninteresting activities? How will we distinguish this from anybody else on Twitter?
Okay I have learned to live with things like putting "Portugal, Europe" instead of just Portugal but was there a reason that "Memorial Day weekend" seemed more appropriate than an actual date? This kind of thing does nothing to dispel the rumours that the USA doesn't recognise places outside of its borders you know.
11:00 : I'm flying! ...
11:05 : Still flying!
11:10 : Yep. Still flying.
11:15 : I'm bored.
11:20 : I spy with my little eye something beginning with S.
11:25 : Yep. It was sky. I'm so bored.
11:35 : Booooring.
13:15 : Kiiiil meeee. Kiiiiiil meeee please...
Yes, this is not only possible, but happening. I don't know about getting to the Moon, but getting into orbit is something that is actively being tried. One really cool video of a rocket getting launched off of a balloon can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnq3r3tRVP0
This was launched by JP Aerospace and is the real thing, from a balloon flying at 10k feet. It was merely a demo flight to test the flight control hardware and to make sure that a rocket actually would launch... and in this case it was just an Estes rocket shoved in a tube when the flight computer remotely ignited the fuse to launch the rocket. The trick was to get the rocket to launch at all, not necessarily to go anywhere.
One other interesting group is the N-Prize that is offering a £10k prize for the first team to launch something into orbit for under £1000. What is really crazy is that there are several teams working on the idea, and that some of them are actually in the process of "bending metal" and trying to make it work. Even if it is just a ping-pong ball sent into orbit, that would be some kind of accomplishment to get a payload of that size to orbital velocities.
Yet another group using this approach is ARCA, and these guys are trying to get to the Moon. They are one of the original X-Prize teams that showed some real promise and have kept tweaking their rocket designs, with the latest attempts for getting to orbit using a very different kind of rocket staging system that you've simply got to see to believe. It pulls up each stage on a tether instead of pushing it up as a disintegrating pyramid.... presumably to develop economies of scale. They are doing most of their launches over the Black Sea, and is perhaps the one group using balloons that I think will get into orbit first.